Cratermatic Topography Analysis Toolkit

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Cratermatic is the result of Michael Mendenhall's summer internship at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, TX. The goal of the internship research was to develop methods for automated characterization of craters from topography data (specifically, altimetry data from the MOLA instrument on the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter). Cratermatic is a set of C++ routines for manipulating topography datasets, accessible through either the command line or an interactive "image calculator" interface.

Getting Cratermatic

From source code:

• A moderately current version of the source code can be downloaded from Sourceforge
• For the most current version of the code, you can get the source from CVS with the command

  'cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cratermatic.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/cratermatic/ checkout source/'

• You will also need to get the FFTW 3 fast fourier transform library.
• To compile, 'cd' to the "source/" directory and run

  'g++ -I$INCLUDEDIR -L$LIBDIR -w craters_*.cpp -03 -o craters craters.cpp -lfftw3'

  replacing $LIBDIR and $INCLUDEDIR with the name of the directories containing the 'libfftw3.a' library file and 'fftw3.h' header file, respectively.

Precompiled binaries:

Check the project downloads page for compiled binaries. These may lag behind the current version available from sourcecode, especially the Windows version. On Windows, you will also need to get the FFTW3 DLL.

Using Cratermatic

The best place to start is by typing './cratermatic help' at the command prompt (assuming that you are in the directory containing the Cratermatic executable named 'cratermatic'). Cratermatic can either run in command-line mode, where it runs the commands given to it on the command line and then exits, or in interactive mode, where it prompts the user to enter further commands after the previous commands are completed. To start Cratermatic in interactive mode, enter './cratermatic' or './cratermatic interactive' at the command line. Use the 'q' or 'quit' command to exit the interactive mode.

The Cratermatic executable acts as an interpreter for a simple Reverse Polish notation command language. While running, Cratermatic maintains in memory a first-in-last-out stack of data objects (Images, numbers, filenames, etc.). In interactive mode, Cratermatic displays the current contents of the stack when prompting for further commands. When Cratermatic starts, the stack starts out empty; following commands add items to the stack or manipulate items already on the stack. The command line and interactive modes use the same commands.

I highly recommend that you go through the Cratermatic Tutorial for an introduction to using the program.